"Abject" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fascinating, sympathising, giving. It was the first time she had seen poverty; she had barely heard of its existence; it had never occurred to her that great romanticists condescended to borrow from life. It was not abject poverty that she witnessed, by any means. There were no hollow cheeks here, no pallid faces, no shrunken limbs. It was, save for the passing distress, to which they were not unaccustomed, a very jolly, hearty, contented poverty. Their belongings were certainly mean, ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... been redoubled of late, and the man never goes out that he is not in the most abject state of fear. He is a pitiful sight, I assure you. I saw him less than a fortnight ago, driving to the Mosque on Friday, and his coachman evidently had orders to go at a gallop through the streets, whilst not only was the entire road protected by soldiers, but every house ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... dogma. The haughtiness and selfishness of the hierarchic spirit, the exclusiveness, cruelty, and cunning tyranny of many of the ancient priesthoods, are well known. Despising, hating, and fearing the people, whom they held in abject spiritual bondage, they sought to devise, diffuse, and organize such opinions as would concentrate power in their own hands and rivet their authority. Accordingly, in the lower immensity they painted and shadowed forth the lurid and dusky ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... bedroom up-stairs. Oh, major, don't leave me here; these men will murder me!" he implores, clutching the skirts of Abbot's heavy overcoat; but Colonel Putnam signals "Go on," and, leaving his abject prisoner, Abbot hastens up the stairs of the old brick house, and there, in a low-ceilinged room, stretched upon the bed, with wild, wandering eyes and fevered lips, with features drawn and ghastly, lies the ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... Chief also go with me.' Then, as soon as thou comest to the house, begin by searching the terrace-roofs; then rummage the closets and cabinets; and if thou find naught, humble thyself before the Kazi and be abject and feign thyself subjected, and after stand at the door and look as if thou soughtest a place wherein to make water,[FN35] because there is a dark corner there. Then come forward, with heart harder than syenite-stone, and lay hold upon a jar of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... by many as a relief from the mechanical theory of life and as a witness to moral {91} freedom and Christian hope. But so far from proving the sovereignty and autonomy of the will, it discloses rather the possibilities of its abject bondage and thraldom. ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... These circumstances mark, that Tamerlane, however he may be indicated by the odious names of Tartar and Conqueror, was no barbarian; that the people who submitted to him did not submit with the abject submission of slaves to the sword of a conqueror, but admitted a great supreme emperor, who was just, prudent, and politic, instead of the ferocious, oppressive, lesser Mahomedan sovereigns, who had before forced their way by the sword into ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... battle—and then a return to this cold and heavy occupation! Had that interval lasted longer, gentlemen, believe me, that ere now I should have carried the victorious banners of Wallachia to the gates of Constantinople, plucked the abject and besotted Sultan from his throne, and again established in more than its pristine renown the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... being in that anarchy that speaks the populace domineering in the most cruel and savage manner, and which a servile multitude broken loose calls liberty; and which in all probability will end, when their Massaniello-like reign is over, in their being more abject slaves than ever, and chiefly by the crime of their 'Etats, who, had they acted with temper and prudence, might have obtained from their poor and undesigning King a good and permanent constitution. Who may prove their tyrant, if reviving loyalty does not in a new frenzy force him to be so, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... the twentieth century it at last clearly appears that marriageable young women have always looked upon marriage as the chief means of escape from the abject slavery and humiliating dependence hitherto imposed upon virgins between fifteen and fifty years old. Shakespeare lacked the courage to write the 'Seven Ages of Woman,' a matter the more to be regretted as no other writer has ever possessed enough command of the English language to describe more ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... said Rothsay, starting from his pause of surprise and mortification, and turning haughtily towards his uncle; "would you have me gage my royal word against that of an abject recreant? Let those who can believe the son of their sovereign, the descendant of Bruce, capable of laying ambush for the life of a poor mechanic, enjoy the pleasure of thinking the ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... and the royal household. The powers of the committee were to last until Michaelmas, 1311. A barren promise that the king's concession should not be counted a precedent made Edward's submission seem a little less abject. Four days later the ordainers were appointed, the method of their election being based upon the precedents ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... so plain that its denial would seem to indicate the extent to which judgment may be influenced by familiarity with perversions of the taxing power. And when we seek to reinstate the self-confidence and business enterprise of our citizens by discrediting an abject dependence upon governmental favor, we strive to stimulate those elements of American character which support the hope ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... bodily defects, the end of the Incarnation seems to be hindered in many ways. First, because by these infirmities men were kept back from knowing Him, according to Isa. 53:2, 3: "[There was no sightliness] that we should be desirous of Him. Despised and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with infirmity, and His look was, as it were, hidden and despised, whereupon we esteemed Him not." Secondly, because the desire of the Fathers would not seem to be fulfilled, in whose person it is written (Isa. 51:9): "Arise, arise, put on Thy strength, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... beautiful; inwardly she was as deformed—as I! But in neither case was he ever able to get the right slant. He loved us both in his splendid, uncritical way. His love brought me to his feet in abject devotion: it lured the woman to accomplish his destruction. Something, some one, menaced her! He tried to sweep the evil ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... tea at Belmont—nectar in Olympus—that evening. Was ever lieutenant so devoutly romantic? He had grown more fanatical and abject in his worship. He spoke less, and lisped in very low tones. He sighed often, and sometimes mightily; and ogled unhappily, and smiled lackadaisically. The beautiful damsel was, in her high, cold way, kind to the guest, and employed him about the room on little commissions, and listened to his speeches ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... they, refusing to comply, lest they should incur the anger of the mob, turned them into the streets, where they wandered up and down hardly remembering the ways untrodden by their feet so long, and crying—such abject things those rotten-hearted jails had made them—as they slunk off in their rags, and dragged their ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... think. It is imprudent, of course, as most things worth doing are. But what have I to lose, I who have my life now planned and laid out and have got far beyond the reach of gratitude or hatred or praise or blame or fear of any man? I sent him some such memoranda. Here came forthwith a note of almost abject thanks. I sent more. Again, such a note—written in his own hand. Yet not a word of what he thinks. The Sphinx was garrulous in comparison. Then here comes a mob of my good friends crying for office for me. So I sent a ten-line ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... obedience, courage in concession, and strength in forbearance, which makes manners noble. Low may he bow, not with loss, but with access of dignity, who bows with an elevated and ascending heart: there is nothing loftier, nothing less allied to abject behavior, than this grand lowliness. The worm, because it is low, cannot be lowly; but man, uplifted in token of supremacy, may kneel in adoration, bend in courtesy, and stoop in condescension. Only a great pride, that is, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... fourteen, and able to understand what I am going to ask of you. If I were not chained to this miserable chair, if I were not a hopeless, abject cripple, I would not depute anyone, not even you, my only child, to do that, which God demands that ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... them when she was no longer there? Either her mother would work too hard and would kill herself; or else the poor woman would be obliged to cease working altogether, and that selfish husband, forever engrossed by his theatrical ambition, would allow them both to drift gradually into abject poverty, that black hole which widens and deepens as ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armed Hath vexed the Red-Sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew Busiris and his Memphian chivalry, While with perfidious hatred they pursued The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld From the safe shore their floating carcases And broken chariot-wheels. So thick bestrown, Abject and lost, lay these, covering the flood, Under amazement of their hideous change. He called so loud that all the hollow deep Of Hell resounded:—"Princes, Potentates, Warriors, the Flower of Heaven—once ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... prison cheerfully to face all the nameless tortures inflicted upon those who help the State—the absolute black silence of convict excommunication, the blows and kicks inflicted without opportunity for retaliation or complaint, the hostility of guards and keepers, the suffering of abject poverty, keener in a prison house than on any ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... the man hear the name of this great mandarin, who was a profound source of terror to the criminals and evil-doers within his jurisdiction, than he fell on his knees before him in the most abject fright, and repeatedly knocking his head on the ground, besought him to ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... takes into its beautiful hands not the abject reason, but the warm soul of man! The self-respecting Jennka was hiding her face in Rovinskaya's dress; Little White Manka was sitting meekly on a chair, her face covered with a handkerchief; Tamara, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... the old ensnaring Test declaim'd. Beside, he bore a most peculiar Hate To sleeping Pilots, all Earth-clods of State. None more abhorr'd the Sycophant Buffoon, And Parasite, th'excrescence of a Throne; Creatures who their creating Sun disgrace, A Brood more abject than Niles Slime-born Race. Such was the Brave Achitophel; a Mind, (If but the Heart and Face were of a kind) So far from being by one base Thought deprav'd, That sure half ten such Souls had Sodom ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... remedies for cows and pigs, and aided in the recovery of stolen goods. After residing successively at Nuremburg, Augsburg, Vienna, and Mindelheim, he retired in the year 1541 to Saltzbourg, and died in a state of abject poverty in the hospital of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... extol even canvass-back ducks, in the year 1800! At the present day, the feeling is fast undergoing an organic change. It is now the fashion to extol everything American, and from submitting to a degree that was almost abject, to the feeling of colonial dependency, the country is filled, to-day, with the most profound provincial self-admiration. It is to be hoped that the next change will bring us to something ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... man stood his ground immovably against whatever might happen, only taking care not to throw himself away in an abject manner, and grieving from his heart that innocence had no safe foundation on which to stand. And the more sad also for this consideration, that before these events took place many of his friends had gone over to other more powerful persons, as in cases of official dignity the lictors ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... didn't quite tell her the truth about Mr. Vernon and me," said Lady St. Craye, wallowing in the abject joys of the confessional. "And I am a beast and not fit to live. But," she added with the true penitent's instinct of self-defence, "I know it's only—oh, I don't know what—not love, with her. And ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... and overturned the post to which Cox was being bound. He could not tell very much about the execution done by the balls, for at first he believed it was some new form of torture which the savages had invented; but when the painted crew fled across the river in abject fear, leaving him comparatively at liberty, he began to understand that the comrades whom he had wickedly wronged were doing what they could ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis
... obey when I am convinced that the empress commands. But in this case I am convinced that it is not my mother, the high-spirited Maria Theresa, who intrusts you with such an abject commission." ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... bed she drew away as if from his touch. He saw that she had forgotten the dead man in a sharp realization of the portent of the living. She glanced about the room in the panic of a trapped lark, an abject ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... His forlorn blue great-coat was buttoned in military fashion to the throat, for painful reasons; and yet it showed much that it pretended to conceal. The bottom edges of the trousers, ragged like those of an almshouse beggar, were the sign of abject poverty. The boots left wet splashes on the floor, as the mud oozed from fissures in the soles. The gray hat, which the colonel held in his hand, was horribly greasy round the rim. The malacca cane, from which the polish had long disappeared, must have stood in all the corners of all ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... with the boundless view, and his chest heaved with an impossible desire, I saw Xerxes and his army, tossed and glittering, rank upon rank, multitude upon multitude, out of sight, but ever regularly advancing, and with confused roar of ceaseless music, prostrating themselves in abject homage. Or, as with arms outstretched and hair streaming on the wind, he chanted full lines of the resounding Iliad, I saw Homer pacing the Aegean sands of the Greek ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... for several seconds. I never closed my hands, but just boxed him right and left, the boys fairly screaming with joy, until I finally gathered all my strength and gave him one resounding cuff that sent him full length to grass, the most abject-looking, baffled bully ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... is not to be confounded with mean-spiritedness, or that abject state of feeling which permits a man to surrender the rights of his character to any one who chooses to infringe upon them. While it thinks little of personal considerations, it thinks the more of character and principle. It is really a powerful aid to progress. When ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... enlighten rather than to delight, is not to say that in his art the realist is not amusing himself as much as ever is the teller of a fairy-tale, though he does not deliberately start out to do so; he is amusing, too, a large part of mankind. For, admitted that the abject, and the test of Art, is always the awakening of vibration, of impersonal emotion, it is still usually forgotten that men fall, roughly speaking, into two flocks: Those whose intelligence is uninquiring in the face of Art, and does not demand ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... because to her all punctuality was a personal affront; it was some time before she discovered the cause to be Miss Fannie Halliday. By that time half the young men in town were in love with Fannie, and three-fourths of them in abject fear of her wit; yet, in true Southern fashion, casting themselves in its ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... Jew-baiting folly is a phase of the same nonsense. It is foolish, because if the possession of capital is denied to the men who can best acquire and hence best continue to employ it, then commercial civilization must take a back seat—in fact, go, and go to stay; and this means abject poverty for everybody but a handful of state and church aristocrats. It is brutal, because it is unreasoning and mistakenly vindictive. It is the howl of the mentally weak—of the mob; and the mob ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... paint the sacred fervor of the devotee, or the ecstasy of the religious enthusiast, as well as the raggedness of the mendicant, or the abject suffering ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... you, like the eels at Melun; and now, begone! out of my sight, quick, you vile canaille!" The discomfited ruffians turned and fled, thankful to make their escape, and forgetful for the moment of their painful wounds and bruises; such abject terror did the young duke's anger inspire in the breasts of those hardened villains. When the poor devils had disappeared, Vallombreuse threw himself down on a heap of cushions, piled up on a low, broad divan beside the fire, and fell into a revery that Vidalinc was careful not to ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... is," said the crow, in a hoarse whisper, "there's a chance for you and me. Can't you see the fox is very stupid, quite abject, and without the least spirit; the stoat is very fierce, but has no mind; everybody suspects the weasel, and will not trust him; as for the rat, he is no favourite; the hawk is—well, the hawk is dangerous, but ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... the thought back of them were too much for John's self-control. The darkness helped him and his need of comfort was abject. Suddenly he burst out, "Oh, Louisa, for heaven's sake, give me a little crumb of comfort, if you have any! How can you stand like a stone all these months and see a man suffering as I have suffered, without giving ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... myself under the bed-covers, in the most abject terror lest she might come back the same way; and, true enough, she did, with a most piercing cry. I never had much rest after that occurrence, as we had no protection against ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... of abject terror, two things struck Puffin. One was that the Major looked at the open door behind him as if meditating retreat, the second that he carried a Gladstone bag. Simultaneously Major Flint spoke, if ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... Peter, in order to see what progress his son had made in mechanics and mathematics, asked him to draw something of a technical nature for his inspection. Alexius, in order to escape such an ordeal, resorted to the abject expedient of disabling his right hand by a pistol-shot. In no other way could the tsarevich have offended his father so deeply. He had behaved like a cowardly recruit who mutilates himself to escape military service. After this, Peter ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to trumpet about the streets the brave nature, the wise conduct, and great glory of the King Diabolus. He would range and rove throughout all the streets of Mansoul to cry up his illustrious Lord, and would make himself even as an abject, among the base and rascal crew, to cry up his valiant prince. And I say, when and wheresoever he found these vassals, he would even make himself as one of them. In all ill courses he would act without bidding, and do mischief ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... danger immediately behind—a mock truce between immortal foes, which either party might violate at pleasure. 'Because the gods were wicked, man was religious; because Olympus was cruel, earth trembled; because the divine beings were the most lawless of Thugs, the human being became the most abject of sycophants.' Even in the most solemn mysteries no such thing as instruction was known—'the priest did not address the people at all.' Hence all moral theories, all doctrinal teaching was utterly disjoined from ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the superiority of others, and her own abject and disgustful state, she cried, "Let me herd with those who won't despise me; let me only see faces whereon I can look without confusion and terror; let me associate with wretches like myself, rather than force my shame before those ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... contrary opinions in men, that the wicked doe glory with the name of good, and contrary the good and innocent be detracted and slandred as evill. Furthermore I, who by her great cruelty, was turned into a foure footed Asse, in most vile and abject manner: yea, and whose estate seemed worthily to be lamented and pittied of the most hard and stonie hearts, was accused of theft and robbing of my deare host Milo, which villany might rather be called parricide then theft, yet might not I defend mine owne cause or denie the fact ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius
... tired my brain and ended up in making me so mad I flung the book into the wood-box.... Dinky-Dunk has just pinned a piece of paper on my door; it is a sentence from Epictetus. And it says: "Better it is that great souls should live in small habitations than that abject slaves should burrow in ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... of him that begot, And the travail of her that bore, Behold they are evermore As warp and weft in our lot. We are children of splendour and flame, Of shuddering, also, and tears. Magnificent out of the dust we came, And abject from the Spheres. ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... her arms akimbo and stared mercilessly at the abject creature before her, who seemed to droop and wilt under her gaze as if he were sinking through the ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... its direct application. But although the question of slavery seems to be incidental and subordinate to the former, virtually the question of slavery is twin to the former. Slavery serves as a basis, as a nurse, for the most infamous and abject aristocracy or oligarchy that was ever built up in history, and any, even the best, the mildest, and the most honest oligarchy or aristocracy kills ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... remotely resembling a belated customer whose demands might busy her beyond the closing hour, and the other had a merry eye and a receptive smile for the hesitant little man with the funny clothes and the quaint pink face of embarrassment. In most abject consternation, ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... not his father—and this in the presence of that King and of Napoleon. Could crime justify crime—could the fiendish lusts and hatreds of a degenerate race offer any excuse for the deliberate guilt of a masculine genius, the conduct of this abject court might have apologised for the policy which it perhaps tempted the pampered ambition of Napoleon to commence, and which it now encouraged him to consummate by an act ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... door of his cave. It was Flavius, the honest steward, whom love and zealous affection to his master had led to seek him out at his wretched dwelling, and to offer his services; and the first sight of his master, the once noble Timon, in that abject condition, naked as he was born, living in the manner of a beast among beasts, looking like his own sad ruins and a monument of decay, so affected this good servant, that he stood speechless, wrapped up in horror, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... his carriage towards us; he would give no part of what he had to spare to any but Captain Cheap, whom his interest led him to prefer to the rest, though our wants were often greater. The captain, on his part, contributed to keep us in this abject situation, by approving this distinction the cacique shewed to him. Had he treated us with not quite so much distance, the cacique might have been more regardful of our wants. The little regard and attention which our necessitous condition ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... is the unvarying statement of these missionaries, deduced from the experience of a hundred years of patient service and laborious exertions among the rudest and most abject tribes of human beings; that the moral nature of man must be in the first instance quickened, the conscience awakened, and the better feelings of the heart aroused, by the motives which Christianity brings with it, before ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... rock. Plunging his hand into the ashes, he poured a fistful with inarticulate low cries over his gray hairs; and the agitation of that obese little body on its knees had a lamentable and grotesque inconsequence, as inexplicable in itself as the sorrow of a madman. Full of wonder before his abject collapse, she murmured: ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... fall into three parts. First, he calms fears by the assurance that the seekers for Christ are dear to Him. 'Fear not ye' glances at the prostrate watchers, and almost acknowledges the reasonableness of their abject terror. To them he could not but be hostile, but to hearts that longed for their and his Lord, he and all his mighty fellows were brethren. Let us learn that all God's angels are our lovers and helpers, if we ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... though with vehemence, the deliberate wish of my heart.—O that I could avoid looking down upon thee, mean groveler, and abject as insulting—Let me withdraw! My soul is in ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... or at least I hope, that there is enough public virtue still remaining among us to make us deny ourselves everything but the bare necessaries of life in order to obtain justice. This we have a right to do, and no power on earth can force us to a change of conduct short of being reduced to the most abject slavery. . . ." He added, in a spirit of strict justice: "As to the pact of non-exportation, that is another thing; I confess that I have doubts of its being legitimate. We owe considerable sums to Great Britain; we can only ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... much. Blindly Elder turned to escape. Instantly both pistols were once more at his head. And in final abject surrender he slowly rubbed the ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... instances of the abject state to which psychology had sunk from the reign of Charles I. to the middle of the present reign of George III.; and even now ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... forehead hard with my hands—Oh do not leave me; or I shall forget what I am about—instead of driving on as we ought with the speed of lightning they will attend to me, and we shall be too late. Oh! God help me! Let him be alive! It is all dark; in my abject misery I demand no more: no hope, no good: only passion, and guilt, and horror; but alive! Alive! My sensations choked me—No tears fell yet I sobbed, and breathed short and hard; one only thought possessed me, and I could only utter ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... her noblest children, who wanted to follow the Gospel? Has she not given her fair daughters into the hands of the confessors, who have defiled and degraded them? How could women, in France, teach her husbands and sons to love liberty, and die for it, when she was herself a miserable, an abject slave? How could she form her husbands and sons to the manly virtues of heroes, when her own mind was defiled and ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... strength to look away, and fled in panic from his chamber into the enclosure of the street. In the cool air and silence, and among the sleeping houses, his strength was renewed. Nothing troubled him but the memory of what had passed, and an abject fear of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and Mrs McNab adores him to the extent of submitting to muddy boots without a murmur. He cracks jokes with her in a free-and- easy manner which strikes awe into the heart of tremblers like myself. It's my first visit to the Nag's Head, and I'm still in the stage of abject submission. ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... else, is poverty. Wait until the 1st of February, and you shall see such an army enter Rome as never before invaded it. I assert that within three miles of this place, at the gates of this capital of Christendom, human beings are living lives more abject ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... any thoughts at all beyond their own busy contrivances how to live and to indulge their craving passions,—all these, by the mesmerism of the heart, and by means of that great witness, conscience, which God, in mercy, leaves as a light from heaven in the most abject dwelling on earth, can, to some extent, read the living epistle of a renewed soul, written in the divine characters of the Holy Spirit. They can see and feel, as they never did anything else in this world, the love which calmly ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... blindly into the big automatic, then, with almost comical haste, he flung up his hands above his head. In that instant Julius had taken his measure. The man he had to deal with was an abject physical coward—the rest would ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination. Of course, as with belief, thought, love, hate, conviction, or even the visual aspect of material things, there are as many shipwrecks as there are men, and in this one there was something abject which made the isolation more complete—there was a villainy of circumstances that cut these men off more completely from the rest of mankind, whose ideal of conduct had never undergone the trial of a fiendish and ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... the only pleasant things that happened to him, and made him forget the humiliation of his poisoned and disfigured face. He was disgusting to himself; when he touched the welts on his forehead and under his hair, he felt unclean and abject. At night, when his fever ran high, and the pain began to tighten in his head and neck, it wrought him to a distressing pitch of excitement. He fought with it as one bulldog fights with another. His mind prowled about among dark legends of torture,—everything ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... humble heart, that she actually feared excess in her attachment to it. In proposing this apprehension as a conscientious doubt to her director, her great fear was that he would oblige her to emerge from her abject position, and assume her rightful place ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... to enjoy or estimate their new privileges. Such a cotemporaneous emancipation of the colored population of the Southern States could only bring a common calamity on all the States, and the most severe misery on those who were to be thus thrown upon society, under the most abject, helpless and deplorable circumstances.'—[Speech of ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... to side, and kept gazing at her; and Elma looked at it, and her nervous terrors grew worse. The cow had horns; suppose it came near, and tried to horn her. She was not a country girl, and did not understand country creatures. A bitter cry of abject terror rose from her lips. She darted past the animal, rushed out by the way she had come into the field, and found herself ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... themselves utterly unworthy of the administrative autonomy conferred upon them by Great Britain. Judged by the laws of war,[347] they had been saved from the alternatives of physical annihilation or abject submission by the almost quixotic generosity of the enemy who fed and housed their non-combatant population. From a constitutional point of view, the presence of Article IV.[348] in the London Convention was in itself sufficient ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... prominent nation; while the Kaiser and Crown Prince had fled for safety to Holland, a nation they had asserted existed only by the long sufferance of Germany. Before the fatal day (November 11, 1918) of the armistice—like the falling of a house of cards—had occurred a succession of abject surrenders, as one by one of the nations composing the Teutonic Alliance had fallen before the crushing ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... of the hut on the heath was the very picture of abject poverty and dreary desolation. The earthen floor was broken and rough; the sunlight came sifting through the chinks in the broken walls. A smoky fire of wet driftwood smoldered, under a pot on the crook. There was neither table nor ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... fact, in the case of the higher historical races it is important to make a more explicit and accurate study of the fetish religion, that is, of the mythical animation of any special phenomenon or thing. Although the scope of such religion is superstitious veneration, or abject fear, yet it is impossible that it should not induce a more precise and less confused notion of the relative condition of things. In this way observation becomes more accurate, and the intrinsic use of the thing is often recognized. By the gradual exercise of such analysis in the ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... scars of her anger, and always of her revenge. But before this grandchild, whom she had reared from infancy, she felt the brute cowardice which is often the only tribute that a debased nature can pay to the incorruptible. Her love must have its basis in some abject emotion: it took its ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... returning her gaze to Corrus just as the man stopped in mid-speech. Billie was no less astonished than the doctor to see the herdsman's expression change as it did; one second it was that of righteous indignation, the next, of the most abject subservience. ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... perpetual joy. Yet he would often sit and sadly think Sad thoughts and deep, and far beyond his years; How sorrow filled the world; how things were shared— One born to waste, another born to want; One for life's cream, others to drain its dregs; One born a master, others abject slaves. And when he asked his masters to explain, When all were brothers, how such things could be, They gave him speculations, fables old, How Brahm first Brahmans made to think for all, And then Kshatriyas, warriors from their birth, Then ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... first tribune of the notaries, who was peculiarly qualified by his dexterity in business, as well as by his former intimacy with the Gothic prince. When they were introduced into his presence, they declared, perhaps in a more lofty style than became their abject condition, that the Romans were resolved to maintain their dignity, either in peace or war; and that, if Alaric refused them a fair and honorable capitulation, he might sound his trumpets, and prepare ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... dignity was secured to it, but henceforth the head of the 'Holy Roman Empire' was not much more than a shadow.... As for the mass of the people, their spirit was broken; for a time they gave up even the longing for the rights which they had lost, and taught their children abject obedience in order ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... wanted his victory to be absolute. He appeared to go into a towering rage, screwing his face into a distorted horror, stamping about like a demon, and disfiguring himself as much as possible—trying, Chinese fashion, the experiment of terrifying the enemy into abject submission, and having a great deal ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... it will realize something very different afterward. Suppose you are not caught up? All the better. I'm forty-four, independent, free, a slave to no man nor monkey. Better live, to write your own tale than be the abject one to another. Better be forty-four and yourself, than a cipher belonging to some body else. Far better beware of the young men than be worn by them. At least so ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... had not named Storri to Dorothy since that awful New Year's night. However, so worn to abject thinness was now his spirit on the constant wheel of fear that he carried Storri's latest word to her without apology. Richard must not visit Senator Hanway in his study. Mr. Harley could not go to Senator Hanway, he could not go to Richard; he could come ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... perhaps most of them) who are as noble, in their line of descent as Indians, as is any Spaniard; and some of them much more than many Spaniards who esteem themselves as nobles in this land. For, although their fate keeps them, in the present order of things, in an almost abject condition, many of them are seigniors of vassals. Their seigniory has not been suppressed by the king, nor can it be suppressed. Such we call cabezas de barangay in Tagalog, and Ginhaopan in Visayan. They and their children and relatives lose nothing of their nobility because ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... good churchwoman who would be sweet as a sister to the abject poor, but offensively condescending to a shopkeeper or a dissenter, exactly as if he was a Pariah, and she a Brahmin. I have known good people who were noble and generous towards their so-called inferiors and full of the ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... to this boy's father the two thousand gold ducats that you received, less the two hundred Austrian florins that you paid him," said the king to his humiliated and abject subjects. "You are great rogues. Be thankful you are ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... be expected from putting them in ill humour, and keeping their tempers constantly on the fret; surely more is to be done when their hearts are at ease, their fears asleep, and their minds softened by sympathizing love and tenderness. At the same time there is a due medium between an abject whiner, and an obstinate insulting teazer, which characters women know well how to distinguish; they despise the one, and they hate the other: all your lovers are of these kinds; Hickman and Lord Goosecap of the first; Lovelace and Booby, when he put on his stately airs after the summer-house ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... fixedly at the Countess Claudieuse with the timid and abject expression of a dog who tries to read ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... which the Court of Directors had legally appointed him to is considered by this audacious tyrant as an insult to him. By this you may judge how he treats not only the servants of the Company, but the natives of the country, and by what means he has brought them into that abject state of servitude in which they are ready to do anything he wishes and to sign anything he dictates. I must again beg your Lordships to remark what this man has had the folly and impudence to place upon the records of the Council of which he was President; and I will venture ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Before his vision passed an enormous globe of bluish color, on which were marked the seas and continents with outlines like those he had seen on maps. It was the Earth! He, an imperceptible molecule in the immensity of space, an abject spectator of the stupendous representation of Nature, beheld the blue globe ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... desperateness of the plot has proved its undoing, and from the tremulous lips of the perpetrators themselves comes to-day a froth of vituperation and rancorous abuse that is the surest confession of abject failure. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... with a police sergeant, and then to sit on his lap and weep. Yet this last I do not wholly believe, for the sergeant in question is a veteran scarcely able to put one foot before the other. Also, Jonah, though a brute, lives in abject fear of ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... their color; there is a bitter and cruel prejudice against them everywhere, and a large minority of the people of this country to-day, if they had the power, would deprive them of all political and civil rights and reduce them to a state of abject servitude. Women have not been enslaved. Intelligence has not been denied to them; they have not been degraded; there is no prejudice against them on account of their sex; but, on the contrary, if ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and Jack Rogers had disposed of the liberated blacks, and had since been the means of setting many others free, though unhappily also the innocent cause of sending not a few to destruction, who might have otherwise drawn out a weary existence in abject slavery. Often had he to console himself with the reflection that their death truly lay at the door of the accursed slave-dealing Arabs. "It is the only way of putting down slavery that I can see, though a rough one," said ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston |
